Eira Tansey

Feminist/Archivist/Quaker/Socialist, in chronological order. Resident of the Ohio River watershed. Founder and manager of archival consulting company Memory Rising, and host of the NO TIME FOR FEAR New Deal history podcast. Do no harm but take no shit.

Website: https://eiratansey.com/
Pronouns: she/her/comrade
Ham call sign: KE8VIL

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Last Notes

2025-12-07 23:01:07 CET

Sometimes I read these things from fellow millennial women about aging and how they feel weird about it and I thank god I spent a lot of my formative years dumpster diving and being adjacent to punk/leftist/artsy scenes and have been at peace with going gray since I was a teenager because I cannot identify with a lot of the hand wringing. Which is not to say it’s not real or in peoples heads, just feeling very tender about how my early weird alt kid identity inoculated me from so much.

2025-12-06 00:45:46 CET

Who has written about boomer MSNBC liberal parents. I am desperate DESPERATE to read this essay. I know it’s way better than having MAGA parents but it’s also a pretty surreal experience how the latest weird Trump thing has entered the conversation along the lines of “did you see the Michigan final score earlier”

2025-10-20 05:05:00 CEST

Leftists yelling about how ineffective No Kings rallies are and what we need is a general strike right this second are giving the same energy of someone mad that a baby who just learned how to walk is not running a marathon. I say this as a leftist with a union background who also has read a decent amount about the labor movement. There’s a reason general strikes in the United States are very rare! Why do we suddenly think we can conjure them out of thin air?!?

2025-07-26 00:01:07 CEST

If Lilith Fair was your first concert and your formative early adult soundtrack was Sleater-Kinney, what should you be listening to now? I am very lost.

2025-07-16 17:25:28 CEST

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As an archivist who studies climate change, I would love to talk to y'all about this topic sometime!!

2025-04-15 20:46:52 CEST

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If this resonates with you, you might be a Virgo or Capricorn.

2025-04-15 20:45:57 CEST

I wish there was a way to talk about the general decline of professionalism and manners and etiquette without sounding like a tradwife or some kind of right-wing scold. People acting totally bitchy in emails, people who charge 3x my hourly rate running late to appointments, people with weaponized scheduling incompetency, I could go on and on but the bar is so low for this stuff it's on the floor. "Everyone is so tired and burned out" yeah me too brother but we live in a society, act like it

2025-03-07 14:32:56 CET

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I ran a pilot workshop back in fall called FUN WITH ARCHIVES that was really intended for writers, creatives, and others to learn how to find and work with archival materials. It was a lot of fun and I eventually want to run it again. I have long suspected that there is a huge void for teaching the public how to use archives and the resources that are out there are underwhelming and basically just lists of URLs but not actually teaching folks how to effectively search for archival records.

2025-03-07 14:29:18 CET

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I’m not hating Google Scholar by the way - now that I do not have any academic affiliation I rely on it almost entirely for my own scholarly reading needs because the databases through my public library don’t have good coverage in my interest areas. But the idea that gathering a bunch of PDFs constitutes research in and of itself, as opposed to an initial step in the research process, is what concerns me greatly.

2025-03-07 14:26:48 CET

Still thinking about a discussion I saw on Substack a few days ago where I saw someone say more essays need actual research behind them (I agree), someone else ask how to do research (fair question) and then the response was use Google Scholar (and that’s when my soul left my body)

2025-03-06 17:58:40 CET

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If you, a non-Jew attempting to build a broad-based coalition to fight for social justice in the local sphere, condition your acceptance of Jewish and Jewish-adjacent people on expecting them to denounce any form or relationship with a place where half of the world’s Jews live, many of whom are our direct relatives, then yeah we have a big problem on our hands. This shit is getting out of hand and it’s getting scary.

2025-03-06 17:48:04 CET

Would be real cool if my city’s leftist organizations could stop antagonizing any local Jewish leaders who don’t pass super messed up litmus tests designed by non-Jews. There’s a reason why I call myself a socialist without a home and I regret that I don’t see the situation changing anytime soon.

2025-03-04 17:02:24 CET

Really into this visualization tool that shows the vast gulf between analog records vs digitized records at NARA. One of the top things that drives archivists nuts is "why can't you digitize it all" - this is totally within the realm of possibility! But much like climate change, it's not a technical challenge but a political problem. To do so takes an army of people digitizing things around the clock, and archives have never been funded with those levels of resources https://www.archives.gov/findingaid/record-group-explorer

2025-02-26 19:04:29 CET

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it’s almost like instability, constantly changing regulations, and major questions about the validity of contract law is really bad for business!

2025-02-21 22:27:53 CET

pour one out for everyone doing volunteer service in your professional associations right now. This shit has always been hard, it's getting harder literally by the hour, and it's thankless work. At best you get to see the seeds you plant bloom years later, at worst people treat you like a punching bag for everything they don't like about the org.

2025-02-12 05:12:34 CET

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Paging @npub1prs…eh8y and @npub1t06…2r9g if either of you have any suggestion/search tips

2025-02-12 05:11:56 CET

Is there a genre term for nonfiction books where there is an entry for each day of the year? I thought it was “book of days” but that’s not helping me track down new titles. An example of what I’m talking about is this title https://wwnorton.com/books/a-readers-book-of-days/

2025-02-11 20:39:07 CET

lol I bet the folks in Puerto Rico, Guam, CNMI, American Samoa and the USVI have a lot to say about this kind of territorial expansion. We really live in the dumbest timeline. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161

2025-01-22 15:46:06 CET

NO TIME FOR FEAR, my New Deal history podcast is live, baby!!!!! We might live in the dumbest timeline ever, but America did a lot of really good stuff nearly a century ago during the height of the Great Depression that we can use as a blueprint moving forward. It's still making its way into all of the podcast directories but is now available via Apple podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-time-for-fear/id1791957947 #history #podcast

2025-01-15 18:34:21 CET

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like, every Silicon Valley techbro is out here training AI on the entire output of human intellectual and creative content across centuries and yet we have artists and podcasters and documentarians worried about using a 30-second clip in their content that technically, legally, perhaps they are supposed to pay someone a for-profit licensing fee for even though those fees assume a real production budget somewhere? Please be for real.

2025-01-15 18:29:54 CET

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Anyway, I belong to the Peter Hirtle school of thought which is that cultural workers are too timid around (c) and should just push the envelope as maximally as possible with fair use by basically doing whatever feels reasonable and in the public interest, and let the corporations have a temper tantrum. in most cases, you can just take it down and avoid a lawsuit!! (this is not legal advice btw, just my attitude I've had for years) (also please do not tell my lawyer about these feelings)

2025-01-15 18:27:07 CET

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Like, sorry but solo history podcasters with an LLC (yes I am talking about myself) are not somehow more "for profit" than say A Major University With a Multi-Billion Dollar Endowment, but the way cultural heritage organizations frame reuse of content reinforces these dumb and arbitrary barriers that are based on 20th century legal fictions, not 21st century economic realities

2025-01-15 18:24:10 CET

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Before anyone starts arguing with me about the tax code and legal forms of business structure, please assume I know what I'm talking about. I understand that 501c3 status means that "profit" is a very different animal than for an LLC or other biz structure. But I think a fairer way to deal with fair use fee waivers for content reuse is based on tiers of revenue/income/profits across organizational structure, not "are you a 501c3/educational institution/nonprofit or not."

2025-01-15 18:22:06 CET

My red hot fair use copyright nuclear take is that for-profit/non-profit clauses are no longer useful in the 21st century content creator economy. A podcaster or documentarian who self-funds their own production and tries to turn a profit for sustaining it through crowdfunding is not the same kind of economic structure as say, PBS and Ken Burns. I say this as someone who used to have to explain fees as a university-based archivist and am now on the other side of the table.

2024-11-23 23:00:57 CET

Folks, there was a book title I ran across recently that I think was a short story collection by an Asian author (I think), and potentially about themes of climate change/technology/weird futures. Can anyone jog my memory what this might have been? I remember wanting to request it from the library and I think I forgot to do so. #literature #books

2024-09-24 14:25:24 CEST

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To be clear, I don’t mean receiving confidential information that is normal to be confidential (personnel issues, financials, etc). I mean internecine dynamics that feel intended to recruit me to one side or another. I can instantly tell the difference because I’ve experienced this since I was a child and it automatically makes me lose respect for whoever is putting me in this non-consensual information receiving position.

2024-09-13 22:46:58 CEST

I need someone to give me a backstory behind the creation of this org. https://alplibraries.org/

2024-08-28 18:31:40 CEST

People who really believe that there’s going to be a huge boomer wealth transfer are really telling you that they have zero experience with eldercare, because unless you’re a 1%er to begin with, home care aide companies or assisted living is getting all of that money, honey

2024-08-24 03:28:37 CEST

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I’m fortunate that the parents in my life Get It and understand the different experiences and politics of caregiving, but the idea that you only understand sacrifice and care through having children is so wildly offensive that it makes my pacifist self literally want to slap the shit out of someone.

2024-08-24 03:23:07 CEST

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Also we should have a conversation some time about how many people who want to have children literally cannot because of caregiving for other family members. This is not my experience but it is a real phenomenon for many people and it’s why the constant erasure of childless caregivers makes me really irritated and uncomfortable.

2024-08-24 03:21:26 CEST

I really fucking hate the term sandwich generation because it a) implies that eldercare is particular to specific generations when caregivers for the elderly are found among many people of many ages (including literal children) and b) it erases the experiences of childless caregivers who are already condescended to by society and work and policy and others in many ways

2024-08-22 21:52:59 CEST

I love that my public library website has no 2FA nonsense or scaremongering about changing my password. Like, thank you for this, seriously.

2024-08-09 22:45:30 CEST

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Literally one of the best things I've ever done for my own health and my friend's sanity levels is loosening my own grip on my unrelenting need for HAVING A PLAN and calendaring and scheduling. Look, I get it, I'm a Capricorn. But there's an art to navigating this with care.